Us from Computers (part 8) Gorillas and Siri

Last updated April, 21, 2012 at 4:45 PM to include a few forgotten points.

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     Let us first look at Turing’s machines.  He was saying that any reasonably complex machine, could with the right set of rules, be mistaken for a human mind during a five minute game.  The rules to the game are simple, two people and one machine are set down in such a way so that one of the people cannot see the computer or the other person.  That person is the interrogator that must, through questioning, determine which is the human and which is the computer.

     To Turing, being mistaken for a human 70% of the time was the same as being functionally equivalent to a human, or at least reasonable so to be able to declare that machine/program combo to be a thinking machine.  One point of interest is that Turing was only talking about digital computers, which has been a point of contention for some time for philosophers examining his arguments.  Despite the semantics of it, if his test of intelligence was a good one, then it should be able to be applied to anything we think might be intelligent. 

     We should be able to run his game with dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, and even unknown unknowns like aliens.  Of course, the tests would have to modified for unique biology or engineering limitations.  If a computer sounded like a Dalek, or the species being interrogated lacked human-like vocal cords, a human couldn’t help but know off the bat they weren’t talking to a human.

Us from Computers (part 7) Agalmatophilia -- look it up!

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     Remember Aristotle’s view of the different types of “souls”?  Well, in his view, which does seem popular with writers like Ovid (43 BCE – 12 CE), the dividing line between life (actuality) and everything else (potentiality) was animation or movement.  So, a stone statue that moves, breaths, and walks, was thought to be alive.  The fact that later the statue gives birth to a son, well, that just proves that it clearly functionally equivalent to a human.

     Now, the astute reader might comment, but clearly, that was a work of fiction, a parable likely meant to teach a moral that is somehow lost on modern observers.  To that I say, not so!  Remember that we look upon Homer’s Odyssey in the same light as we look upon Ovid.  The Greeks and Romans did not share our views.  They taught it as history, as real and as true as Christians insist the Bible is true, and more factual that historians declare their accounts are of past doings.

     So, when Ovid sat down to record what was likely an older tale of a statue come to life through the blessings of Venus, well, there would have been little doubt that the statue was truly alive, by Aristotle’s definition, and in possession of at least an adaptive soul, if not a fully rational soul, a mind, as well.  This would even be true if the “flesh” of the statue had never changed from the ivory.

Us from Computers (part 6) Don't anger the geeks

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     At this point a good number of computer geeks are likely either screaming at their screens or they’re scratching their heads, wondering what the hell Tarski had to do with computers.  Perhaps it would make more sense to them if I were talking about George Boole, the 19^th century logician that invented what would become Boolean algebra.  Maybe I should point out that Boolean algebra became the basis for most computer programming languages and is what Turing was referring too when he talked about algorithms in a thinking machine. 

     Or possibly, I should talk about Yuri Gurevich, and his Abstract State Machines.  After all, he applied a form of Tarski’s modeling to computer languages that we’re using today.  Indeed, they would all be good selections of logicians and computer scientists to talk about in this discussion. 

     The one thing that Tarski did, that none of them did, is overcome a major, gaping weakness in modeling logic, the fact that logic was incapable of symbolizing, properly interrupting the semantics, the meanings of words we use in arguments with ease all the time.  What he did was allow others like Gurevich, to more closely model the way we think, but inside a digital computer.  Before Tarski’s work, Turing’s ideas had no possibility of being true, because the Boolean algebra he was using couldn’t process categorical arguments like syllogisms, one of the oldest logic argument forms that were first recorded by Aristotle.

Us from Computers (part 5) It's only logical

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     Okay, so Functionalism as a Philosophic theory took another 60 years and a computer to develop.  They didn’t use the computer to figure anything out nor was it just any kind of computer, after all the Greeks had computers.  The computer that got philosophers thinking was a digital (as in counting), non-analog, general-purpose computer that could, theoretically, do anything.   Half a century later, my computer plays a mean game of chess, but still can’t make a decent gin martini, well, not the way I like them. 

     The thought went like this, if we make a machine that can read a bunch of ones and zeros that are actually a code of really simple instructions, even complex tasks, once broken down into the smallest possible operations of intellect, the computer could emulate the thinking process.  (It’s too bad early computer engineers didn’t have some machine to do their thinking for them, we could have had the digital highway generations ago—too bad that it’s really the Jersey turnpike.)  The man that brought you the thing that you use to find out how your friends are, what today’s meme the meme of three seconds ago, and see cute pictures of cats doing stupid things, was Alan Turing.  He was also the man that argued quite loudly that one day, in the far distant year of 2000, that human intellect would be challenged by our own creations and that we’d have to deal with this new artificial intelligence. 

     What Shelley’s imagination had done almost two fourscore before was being proposed again, just this time with physics, logic and math replacing chemistry and occult.  Just like Victor, Alan forgot to make his creation … not hideous.  It would take an a little over half a fourscore for computers to become beautiful but only a few decades to put most bookkeepers out of a job.   Maybe that was Dr. Frankenstein’s problem, he stopped at creature version 0.1. 

Us from Computers (part 4) If a tree falls

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     Functionalism seems socially beneficial and relatively simple, while still being informative, and complying with expectations we derive from our understanding of the world around us.  It seems to be a good theory, which is why it is still one of the main competing theories of the Mind, even though intuitively it makes some people nervous to think of themselves as Hobbes did, biological calculators.  Not in the sense that we do math all day (4:29 and this one), but that when you press our buttons (provide a stimulus, or as Hobbes would put it introduce an object that causes fancy), you get an answer (motivation or reaction).  So, one (hunger) plus two (the smell of food) equals three (a salivating mouth). 

     What seems like commonsense today did not during the 1600’s when Hobbes did his work.  As he described it, most schools of philosophy were stuck on the concept that everything that you see sends out an aspect of itself and the act of your eyes stanching up that aspect is seeing.  It wasn’t that light was striking the object and reflecting off in a way that could be detected by our eyes.  It was more like if you close the refrigerator, there is no light inside because no one is there to see it.

     To a modern thinker, it is even a bit stranger than that.  If you understand something, they didn’t think that it was some process in your head that caused you to understand; it was that the object of the thing you understand was projecting intelligence about itself into your head.  The act of knowing was really your mind grabbing up that intelligence.  What you think you know is just objects projecting knowledge into your mind.  Be like Socrates, wear a tinfoil hat and know nothing (clearly, that is a joke, Socrates was too poor to own tin).

Us from Computers (part 3) Faith in Crime

Last updated April 21, 2012, 3:00 pm: fixed wrong word (thanks "Anonymous").

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     A Functionalist might very well forward the argument, that in a deterministic world — one where outcomes of interactions are governed by predictable, knowable laws — the “purpose to life” question is as insignificant as asking what is the meaning of the electromagnetic spectrum, gravity or equal and opposite reactions.  They have no telos; they just exist.  “Purpose of life” is just silly romanticism, at best.  Another group that would forward a similar argument, coming from the Philosophy of Religion and having a large overlap in membership, would be atheists.

     While it isn’t a requirement to be an atheist to espouse a Functionalist viewpoint, I’m not convinced that a religious Functionalist is a logical possibility.  The existence of a divine being works directly against a deterministic universe; the possibility of truly supernatural events (ones that completely violate physical laws) does not fit into the casual nature of observed phenomena.  It might be easier to prove the existence of god than it would be to find a theistic Functionalist that is rational and has truly thought both positions through.  I must concede my agnosticism to the existence of a real theistic Functionalist, but like god, I’d love to meet one; I have many questions to ask.

Us from Computers (part 2) It's all in your head

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     A debate arose in Psychology almost immediately after it was established, 133 years ago.  The debate was between three theories of how to study the mind, and the split was between the Psychological theories of Structuralism, Functionalism, and Freudian Psychoanalysis.  Structuralism sought to understand the mind the way a chemist might examine a complex substance, by pulling it apart and trying to identify and understand the most basic elements.  Functionalism used Darwinian theories to try to identify why our behaviors formed in the first place and what use they were to us.  Sigmund Freud took Descartes’ concept of the mind and split it into two main parts, the conscious and subconscious, and sought to “cure” people of aberrant behaviors by exposing their conscious minds to what he believed to be the unconscious workings of their emotions.  Today, all three theories have been shown both useful but inadequate.  As the field progressed, those theories became stepping-stones into the realm of the Mind, but few serious researchers still linger that close to the shore today.

     It is important to note that Psychology is a specialized field of study, which concerns itself with answering how the mind works, and is incapable of answering some of the more basic (or rather really deep) questions we have been asking about the Mind.  Neurobiology continues to expand our understanding of how the brain works, and Philosophy continues to explore what the mind is.  Each field academically interacts and informs the rest.

     Of particular interest to Philosophers of the Mind was the theory of Functionalism, which lent its name to a theory first hinted at over 2,300 years ago by Aristotle and supported by a notion that Thomas Hobbes had in the early 17^th century.  Aristotle believed in the soul, or rather reasoned his way to a non-religious view of it.  He thought that there was a difference between the matter of something and the form of something. He described them as the potentiality and actuality of a thing, which in combination gave rise to an emergent type of substance we’d call life.

Us from Computers (part 1) Life of the Party

Note #1: this is altogether too long for me to effectively polish up at this exact moment, but "The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist."-Novalis  
This tidbit of writing needs to get off my desk, or I'll never be finished.  When you find some mistake, bad link, typo, or the like, please post a comment so that I can fix it.
Note #2:  I'm breaking this article into several smaller posts so that it will be easier to read.  It will take a little time for me to finish it, but if I'm going to eat this elephant, it'll be one byte at a time.  Keep checking back.


(Last Updated 10:40 AM, May 6, 2012, Fixed hyperlink)


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     Essentially, everyone that was born since the first publishing of Mary Shelley’s novel, The Modern Prometheus (better known as Frankenstein), has at least been exposed to the idea that sometime in the future science would allow us to cheat death, to live forever in some other body.  It is a safe bet to say that in her work of classic horror fiction, Shelley was tapping into the hopes and fears of the readers at the time.  So, you could say that there already was some strong desire to keep existing after we die.

     Of course, Frankenstein was not the first Western writing to forward the idea of living forever, in a new body.  Religions throughout the Western world have been making similar claim for thousands of years.  The Egyptian god Osiris is the very embodiment of that thought.  

     Through his mastery over life and death, Osiris represented both the cycles of the Nile River (life when the river flowed and death when it nearly dried up, followed by life again), and the belief in literal life after death, although in the same body as he had before as long as it was properly mummified.  Religion after religion repeated that theme with added details, amended storyline, and plagiarized material used by each new cult to arise.   Arguably, the most influential on the West is the Christian mythos, which comforts believers with the thought that their souls sleep when their bodies die and will awaken again when Christ returns.